Regardless which point of view you choose – carrier exclusiveness sucks!

1) Customer
As a customer you have to buy the iPhone from one of the exclusive carriers, including a multi-year contract.
Even if you fulfilled your contract (or exited early via early termination fee), the property you bought (the iPhone) is not really yours,
since it’s just a useless paperweight without ANOTHER new exclusive carrier contract.
Apple or the exclusive carriers should be legally forced to OFFICIALLY(!) unlock iPhones which exited a contract

2) Developer
Developers look forward to the AppStore. The AppStore (=iTunes for Software) allows developers to sell their Applications directly on the customers device.
Apple takes 30% of the sales prices, so the developer gets 70%.
So whats important for the developer? A huge market – right. Whats makes a market huge? Right – authorized unlocks, since otherwise people probably wont update to the 2.0 appstore firmware and instead stay with 1.1.4 and use the inofficial installer.app – no revenue – great!

All this bad customer associations with the carrier-lock in ALREADY influence our mac software sales.
I work in the educational sector and while only one year ago a lot of people switched to the mac, now people add much more critzism when its about apple,
like -their are just another evil company, they are locking in their customers, probably they’ll lock you in with the mac like with the iphone- and so on.
The bad iPhone press and the poisioned atmosphere around the exclusive carriers (like evesdropping AT&T or T-Mobile) already influences the apple brand itself!

3) Investor
Well – Apple earns from iTunes sales and 30% from AppStore sales.
Anymore questions? The more iPhones in use, the more Apple will earn. So not officially unlocking iPhones just sucks from an investors point of view.
The revenue comes from the USE of the device, not the initial SALE of the device.
Of course the “brand issues” mentioned in the developers point of view apply here to – probably (in the long term) even more significant.

b.t.w.:
We (geeky) people all tend to forget the following:
There are a LOT of people not willing to sign a contract with one of the exclusive carriers, but they probably would buy used iPhones (and then produce revenue via AppStore and iTunes store).
Many (geeky) people are probably also able to unlock, jailbreak and activate their SIM-LOCKED iPhones, but out there is also a vaaaaast majority of kids, moms, grannys and so on, probably many of them already bought used (jailbreaked, unlocked and activated) iPhones, but they WONT be able to upgrade, jailbreak, unlock and activate them THEMSELVES, so they wont update – so: no appstore, no revenue for apple, the investors and the developers.

Am I really the only one realizing, that Apple shoots in his own knee with the carrier exlusiveness?